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Chinese companies are working on a new project to connect the Southern Saudi provincial capitals of Abha in Aseer Province with Jazan in Jazan province via a 130-kilometre road, at a cost of around 19 billion Saudi riyals ($5 billion), a Saudi official has said.
The project aims to reduce travel time to one and a half hours instead of three hours and is considered a major engineering undertaking, encompassing around 26 bridges and tunnels, Abdul Qader Othman Amir, Executive Vice President for Technical Affairs at the Asir Development Authority (ADAtold the Saudi daily Aleqtisadia.
He added that the cost of the project under the build-operate-transfer model was SAR 39 billion ($10.4 billion).
He noted that there are other major development projects underway in the transportation sector, including connecting major cities such as Abha, Khamis Mushait, and Al-Majardah in what is known as the "Living Heritage" or "Greater Abha" project. “This is because the region has a high population density, representing nearly 50% of the population of the Asir region, and the project aims to connect it to the other governorates of Asir,” he said.
"There are also plans to connect the Bisha region to the existing railway network in the Kingdom and improve multimodal transportation options to alleviate road congestion, especially during peak seasons,” he said.
In August 2025, the team of Roads General Authority (RGA), National Centre for Privatisation & PPP (NCP) and Asir Development Authority (ASDA) had announced that five major consortiums had been pre-qualified for the 136-km-long Asir-Jazan Highway Project, which was tendered (in February 2024) as a 30-year Design-Build-Finance-Operate-Maintain (DBFOM) contract.
(Writing by N Saeed; Editing by Anoop Menon)
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